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mangled name
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mangler
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mangle
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= M =
mangled namen.
A name, appearing in a C++ object file, that is a coded representation of the object declaration as it appears in the source. Mangled names are used because C++ allows multiple objects to have the same name, as long as they are distinguishable in some other way, such as by having different parameter types. Thus, the internal name must have that additional information embedded in it, using the limited character set allowed by most linkers. For instance, one popular compiler encodes the standard library function declaration "memchr(const void*,int,unsigned int)" as "@memchr$qpxviui".
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mangler
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manularity
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mangled name
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= M =
manglern.
[DEC] A manager. Comparemanagement. Note thatsystem mangleris somewhat different in connotation.
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manularity
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marbles
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mangler
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manularity/man`yoo-la'ri-tee/ n.
[prob. fr. techspeak `manual' + `granularity'] A notional measure of the manual labor required for some task, particularly one of the sort that automation is supposed to eliminate. "Composing English on paper has much higher manularity than using a text editor, especially in the revising stage." Hackers tend to consider manularity a symptom of primitive methods; in fact, a true hacker confronted with an apparent requirement to do a computing taskby handwill inevitably seize the opportunity to build another tool (seetoolsmith).
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marbles
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marginal
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manularity
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marblespl.n.
[from mainstream "lost all his/her marbles"] The minimum needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or abstractions. After a bad system crash, you need to determine if the machine has enough marbles to come up on its own, or enough marbles to allow a rebuild from backups, or if you need to rebuild from scratch. "This compiler doesn't even have enough marbles to compilehello world."
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marginal
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Marginal Hacks
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marbles
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marginaladj.
[common] 1. [techspeak] An extremely small change. "A marginal increase incorecan decreaseGCtime drastically." In everyday terms, this means that it is a lot easier to clean off your desk if you have a spare place to put some of the junk while you sort through it. 2. Of little merit. "This proposed new feature seems rather marginal to me." 3. Of extremely small probability ofwinning. "The power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it fried."
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Marginal Hacks
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marginally
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marginal
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Marginal Hacksn.
Margaret Jacks Hall, a building into which the Stanford AI Lab was moved near the beginning of the 1980s (from theD. C. Power Lab).
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marginally
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marketroid
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Marginal Hacks
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= M =
marginallyadv.
Slightly. "The ravs here are only marginally better than at Small Eating Place." Seeepsilon.
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marketroid
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Mars
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marginally
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= M =
marketroid/mar'k*-troyd/ n.
alt. `marketing slime', `marketeer', `marketing droid', `marketdroid'. A member of a company's marketing department, esp. one who promises users that the next version of a product will have features that are not actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to implement, and/or are in violation of the laws of physics; and/or one who describes existing features (and misfeatures) in ebullient, buzzword-laden adspeak. Derogatory. Comparedroid.
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Mars
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martian
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marketroid
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Marsn.
A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone Wrong. Mars was the code name for a family of PDP-10 compatible computers built by Systems Concepts (now, The SC Group): the multi-processor SC-30M, the small uniprocessor SC-25M, and the never-built superprocessor SC-40M. These machines were marvels of engineering design; although not much slower than the uniqueFoonlyF-1, they were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slowerDECKS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were also completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries (including the operating system) with no modifications at about 2-3 times faster than a KL10.
When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983, Systems Concepts should have made a bundle selling their machine into shops with a lot of software investment in PDP-10s, and in fact their spring 1984 announcement generated a great deal of excitement in the PDP-10 world. TOPS-10 was running on the Mars by the summer of 1984, and TOPS-20 by early fall. Unfortunately, the hackers running Systems Concepts were much better at designing machines than at mass producing or selling them; the company allowed itself to be sidetracked by a bout of perfectionism into continually improving the design, and lost credibility as delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the product ridiculously; they believed they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8600 and failed to reckon with the likes of Sun Microsystems and other hungry startups building workstations with power comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the price. By the time SC shipped the first SC-30M to Stanford in late 1985, most customers had already made the traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10, usually for VMS or Unix boxes. Most of the Mars computers built ended up being purchased by CompuServe.
This tale and the related saga ofFoonlyhold a lesson for hackers: if you want to play in theReal World, you need to learn Real World moves.
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martian
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massage
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Mars
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martiann.
A packet sent on a TCP/IP network with a source address of the test loopback interface [127.0.0.1]. This means that it will come back labeled with a source address that is clearly not of this earth. "The domain server is getting lots of packets from Mars. Does that gateway have a martian filter?" CompareChristmas tree packet,Godzillagram.
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massage
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math-out
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martian
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massagevt.
[common] Vague term used to describe `smooth' transformations of a data set into a different form, esp. transformations that do not lose information. Connotes less pain thanmunchorcrunch. "He wrote a program that massages X bitmap files into GIF format." Compareslurp.
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math-out
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Matrix
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massage
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math-outn.
[poss. from `white-out' (the blizzard variety)] A paper or presentation so encrusted with mathematical or other formal notation as to be incomprehensible. This may be a device for concealing the fact that it is actuallycontent-free. See alsonumbers,social science number.
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Matrix
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maximum Maytag mode
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math-out
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Matrixn.
[FidoNet] 1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops callFidoNet. 2. Fanciful term for acyberspaceexpected to emerge from current networking experiments (seethe network). The name of the rather good 1999cypherpunkmovie "The Matrix" played on this sense, which however had been established for years before. 3. The totality of present-day computer networks (popularized in this sense by John Quarterman; rare outside academic literature).
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maximum Maytag mode
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meatspace
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Matrix
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maximum Maytag moden.
What awashing machineor, by extension, any disk drive is in when it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced load. If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becomingwalking drives. In 1999 it's been some years since hard disks were large enough to do this, but the same phenomenon has recently been reported with 24X CD-ROM drives.
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meatspace
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meatware
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maximum Maytag mode
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meatspace/meet'spays/ n.
The physical world, where the meat lives - as opposed tocyberspace. Hackers are actually more willing to use this term than `cyberspace', because it's not speculative - we already have a running meatspace implementation (the universe). CompareRL.
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meatware
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meeces
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meatspace
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meatwaren.
Synonym forwetware. Less common.
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meeces
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meg
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meatware
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meeces/mees'*z/ n.
[TMRC] Occasional furry visitors who are noturchins. [That is, mice. This may no longer be in live use; it clearly derives from the refrain of the early-1960s cartoon character Mr. Jinx: "I hate meeces topieces!" -- ESR]
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meg
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mega-
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meeces
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meg/meg/ n.
Seequantifiers.
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mega-
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megapenny
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meg
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mega-/me'g*/ pref.
[SI] Seequantifiers.
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megapenny
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MEGO
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mega-
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megapenny/meg'*-pen`ee/ n.
$10,000 (1 cent * 10^6). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer cost and performance figures.
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MEGO
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meltdown network
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megapenny
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MEGO/me'goh/ or /mee'goh/
[`My Eyes Glaze Over', often `Mine Eyes Glazeth (sic) Over', attributed to the futurologist Herman Kahn] Also `MEGO factor'. 1. n. Ahandwaveintended to confuse the listener and hopefully induce agreement because the listener does not want to admit to not understanding what is going on. MEGO is usually directed at senior management by engineers and contains a high proportion ofTLAs. 2. excl. An appropriate response to MEGO tactics. 3. Among non-hackers, often refers not to behavior that causes the eyes to glaze, but to the eye-glazing reaction itself, which may be triggered by the mere threat of technical detail as effectively as by an actual excess of it.
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meltdown network
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meme
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MEGO
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meltdown, networkn.
Seenetwork meltdown.
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meme
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meme plague
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meltdown network
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meme/meem/ n.
[coined by analogy with `gene', by Richard Dawkins] An idea considered as areplicator, esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase `meme complex' denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the `hacker subculture' meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, `meme' is often misused to mean `meme complex'. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons.
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meme plague
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memetics
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meme
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meme plaguen.
The spread of a successful but perniciousmeme, esp. one that parasitizes the victims into giving their all to propagate it. Astrology, BASIC, and the other guy's religion are often considered to be examples. This usage is given point by the historical fact that `joiner' ideologies like Naziism or various forms of millennarian Christianity have exhibited plague-like cycles of exponential growth followed by collapses to small reservoir populations.
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memetics
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memory farts
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meme plague
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memetics/me-met'iks/ n.
[frommeme] The study of memes. As of early 1999, this is still an extremely informal and speculative endeavor, though the first steps towards at least statistical rigor have been made by H. Keith Henson and others. Memetics is a popular topic for speculation among hackers, who like to see themselves as the architects of the new information ecologies in which memes live and replicate.
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memory farts
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memory leak
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memetics
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memory fartsn.
The flatulent sounds that some DOS box BIOSes (most notably AMI's) make when checking memory on bootup.
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memory leak
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memory smash
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memory farts
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memory leakn.
An error in a program's dynamic-store allocation logic that causes it to fail to reclaim discarded memory, leading to eventual collapse due to memory exhaustion. Also (esp. at CMU) calledcore leak. These problems were severe on older machines with small, fixed-size address spaces, and special "leak detection" tools were commonly written to root them out. With the advent of virtual memory, it is unfortunately easier to be sloppy about wasting a bit of memory (although when you run out of memory on a VM machine, it means you've got arealleak!). Seealiasing bug,fandango on core,smash the stack,precedence lossage,overrun screw,leaky heap,leak.
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memory smash
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menuitis
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memory leak
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memory smashn.
[XEROX PARC] Writing through a pointer that doesn't point to what you think it does. This occasionally reduces your machine to a rubble of bits. Note that this is subtly different from (and more general than) related terms such as amemory leakorfandango on corebecause it doesn't imply an allocation error or overrun condition.